The Listing Attic Poem by Edward Gorey

There was a young curate whose brain
Was deranged from the use of cocaine;
He lured a small child
To a copse dark and wild
Where he beat it to death with his cain.

Each night Father fills me with dread
When he sits on the foot of my bed;
I'd not mind that he speaks
In gibbers and squeaks,
But for seventeen years he's been dead.

The babe, with a cry brief and dismal,
Fell into the water baptismal;
Ere they'd gathered its plight,
It had sunk out of sight,
For the depth of the font was abysmal.

The first child of a Mrs. Keats-Shelley
Came to light with its face in its belly;
Her second was born
With a hump and a horn
And her third was as shapeless as jelly.


An old gentlemen's crotchets and quibblings
Were a terrible trial to his siblings,
But he was not removed
Till one day it was proved
That the bell-ropes were damp with his dribblings.

There was a young lady named Fleager
Who was terribly, terribly eager
To be all the rage
On the tragedy stage,
Though her talents were pitifully meager.

There's a rather odd couple in Herts,
Who are cousins(or so each asserts):
Their sex is in doubt
For they're never without
Their moustaches and long, trailing skirts.

A nurse motivated by spite
Tied her infantine charge to a kite;
She launched it with ease
On the afternoon breeze,
And watched till it flew out of site.

Augustus, for splashing his soup,
Was put out for the night on the stoop;
In the morning he'd not
Repented a jot,
And next day he was dead of the croup.

The sight of his guests filled Lord Cray
At breakfast with horrid dismay,
So he launched off the spoons
The pits from his prunes
At their heads as they neared the buffet.


There was a young lady named Rose
Who fainted whenever she chose
She did so one day
While playing croquet
But was quickly revived with a hose.

A headstrong young woman in Ealing
Threw her two weeks' old child at the ceiling.
When quizzed why she did,
She replied, 'to be rid
Of a strange, overpowering feeling.'

They had come in the fugue to the stretto
When a dark, bearded man from a ghetto
Slipped forward and grabbed
Her tresses and stabbed
Her to death with a rusty stiletto.

A certain young man, it was noted,
Went about in the heat thickly-coated;
He said, 'You may scoff,
But I shan't take it off;
Underneath I am horribly bloated.'

A lady was seized with intent
To revise her existance misspent,
So she climbed up the dome
Of St Peter's in Rome,
Where she stayed through the following Lent.

There was a young woman whose stammer
Was atrocious, and so was her grammar;
But they were not improved
When her husband was moved
To knock out her teeth with a hammer.

A dreary young bank clerk named Fennis
Wished to foster an aura of menace;
To make people afraid
He wore gloves of gray suede
And white footgear intended for Tennis.

While his duchess lay practically dead,
The Duke of Daguerrodarque said:
'Can it be this is all?
How puny! How small!
Have destroyed this disgrace to my bed!'

To a weepy young woman in Thrums
Her betrothed remarked, 'This is what comes
Of allowing your tears
To fall into my ears-
I think they have rotted the drums.'

A gift was delivered to Laura
From a cousin who lived in Gomorrah;
Wrapped in tissue and crepe,
It was peeled like a grape
And emitted a pale, greenish aura.

A clerical student named Pryne
Through pain sought to reach the divine:
He wore a hair shirt,
Quite often ate dirt,
And bathed every Friday in brine.

The partition of Vavasour Scowles
Was a sickener: they came on his bowels
In a firkin; his brain
Was found clogging a drain,
And his toes were inside of some towels.

There was a young woman named Plunnery
Who rejoiced in the practice of gunnery
Till one day unobservant,
She blew up a servant,
And was forced to retire to a nunnery.

An innocent maiden named Herridge
Was cruelly tricked into marriage:
When she later found out
What her spouse was about,
She threw herself under a carriage.


Some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy,
Drank up several bottles of sherry;
In the yard, around three,
They were shrieking with glee:
'Come on out, we are burning a fairy!'